Learning from 2011 gardening experience

Every time you learn something new, your brain gets a new wrinkle

Memories from 2011 include the outstanding rose garden at Château de Bagatelle in Paris.

Photograph by: Steve Whysall
, Vancouver Sun

My sweet peas never made it out of the ground. I almost killed myself doing heavy landscape work. I was in more beautiful gardens than ever before. I fell in love with Sancerre, Vouvray and Aperol. I met two dead men whose deaths have changed the way I live. And I learned a valuable lesson from a pigeon about defending your turf. It's been quite a year.

Every time you learn something new, you get another wrinkle in your brain, they say. If that's true, my year has been a big one for accumulating brain wrinkles.

Shall I do this chronologically? Nah.

Let's start with the dead men who I encountered on my garden tours of Italy and France: Otzi, the Iceman, about 5,300 years old, who I came face-to-frozen-mush with in Bolzano, Italy, and Nicolas Fouquet, 17th-cen-tury French aristocrat in the court of Sun King Louis XlV, who I met (in wax form) at the brilliant garden he built at Vaux-le-Vicomte.

Otzi was living a quiet life at the foot of the Alps on the Italian-Austrian border when something went very wrong and he ended up being pursued up and up the mountain until he was shot in the back and left for dead on one of the snowy peaks.

But the story didn't end there. Otzi's body was preserved in the packed ice for 5,000 years, then discovered in 1991; it can now be viewed in its mummified form in Bolzano.

Otzi was an ancient man, but as modern as could be in his wish to get away from the crowds and climb a mountain if need be to find peace and, despite all his best efforts, ended up getting shot in the back. Oh, slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

The point is: Otzi loved life so much, even in the miserable Bronze Age, that he clung to it with a passion. I feel we can all learn from him. His resilience, his resourcefulness, his intense desire to live. And even if we do end up get-ting shot in the back, we know the story isn't necessarily over.

Nicolas Fouquet was a good guy. Rich, but basically good. His mother was a virtual saint. He had good parents. He wanted to do something special, so he built a beautiful house and garden. Some say it is still the most beautiful château in France.

Unfortunately, Nicolas made one fatal error. He forgot about the negative power of the green-eyed monster. Oh, and what a monster it is.

When he had secretly built his fabulous garden (with the help of Andre Le Notre and others), he invited the Sun King over for a party. Big mistake.

Nicolas wanted everyone to have a good time. He was showing off, a bit, yes, but, hey, why not and it was all done in a tasteful way - gold plates, fireworks, horses and jewels for door prizes and fantastic entertainment.

Trouble was the king got jealous, tossed Nicolas in jail (he only got to enjoy his garden for a month) and there (in jail) he rotted and died. Cue violins.

The point is: We can't let the green-eyed monster spoil things, especially our envy of other people's gardens, but we certainly need to be careful how we share our successes because, it's a sad fact, not everyone likes it when we succeed.

I came away from Nicolas and Vaux-le-Vicomte with a fresh perspective, a new attitude about the riches and privileges of others, and Nicolas really did seem to set me free from a lot of petty resentments.

Okay, moving on. For this next bit, I think you would enjoy it more if you downloaded Eartha Kitt's Je Cherche un Homme or Stephane Grappelli's La Chanson Des Rue and let these tunes play in the background. It'll set the mood for these remembrances of joyful days in other French gardens this spring.

What an unforgettable and thrilling time it was to walk in the gorgeous gardens of Bagatelle, Courances, Chatonniere, Apremont-sur-Allier, and not least of all, Monet's superb creation at Giverny. Glorious.

It was one fabulous garden high after another and it never ended. Day after day. How could this be? The demonstration gardens at Chaumont (wonderful), the green wall of Patrick Blanc in Paris (exquisite), the quiet walled garden of Château Beauregard (charming).

One detail that I carry with me is of the octagonal belvedere at Apremont where the walls are decorated with paintings telling the fantasy story of a troupe of Venetian puppets who travel the world seeing wonders ... only to return to find the real wonder they were seeking was right there all along in their own back yard.

I treasure the images I have of the eight stages of their journey through Africa, Asia and South America and back. How true is it that our heart's desire is often there right under our nose?

Prosecco has been my favourite gar-den drink ever since I first sampled it in Italian gardens, especially this year after spending time at the amazing villa gardens on Lakes Como and Maggiore.

But two new garden-perfect wines won my heart this year: Sancerre and the delicious, ever-sparkling Vouvray.

Then, in Bologna in September, I encountered my first Aperol spritzer and loved it too. It's what all the gardeners there drink, I discovered.

And it was while doing a tasting that a pigeon, the most aggressive, wilful, self-possessed pigeon I have ever encountered, came into my life to teach a lesson about having a passion for public space.

In Piazza Maggiore, the bird landed on the table of a woman sitting near me and began attacking the little portions of peanuts and potato chips that the waiter brings with every drink delivered.

The woman tried to shoo the pigeon away, but it was as bold as a lion and snapped back and stood its ground and eventually the woman, out of frustration, scattered the little dish of peanuts on the ground in an attempt to distract the pigeon.

The waiter spotted the commotion and quickly leaped into action with a long stick with red ribbons attached and used it like a lion-tamer's whip to drive away the persistent pigeon. The bird walked (did not fly) away reluctantly.

Yes, I thought, I get it, I see your point, little pigeon: We should all be prepared to defend the public social places we love and rely on as places of peace and tranquillity and emotional nourishment.

As it happened, I was reading The City in Mind (Notes on the Urban Condition) by James Howard Kun-stler, in which he also makes the same valuable observation that when we really care about our city, we instinctively want to protect and preserve the social environments we find so pleasurable.

So the seeds of my sweetpeas died in the cold, wet spring soil, but there were compensations. My Evison clematis did great in a container, grown over a pyramid trellis, and I tried out Salvia 'Juicy Fruit' for the first time and loved it. You will, too, for its fabulous lime-green foliage, which is so sturdy and structural. It'll be widely available in spring.

A gardener's year is full of surprises. I thought I had seen Elton John in a laundromat in Berlin, but was wrong, yet it was still fun asking him how to work the spin cycle.

I like to think that gardening opens the heart to so many other joys of life because it make us look more closely at life as it appears right in front of us. Hope 2012 is a year full of new brain wrinkles for you.

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